Two exhibitions timed to the centenary of the architect and urban planner’s death reveal his inimitable gift for uniting elegance, sophistication and utility.

One hundred years ago, as World War I drew to a close and the Austro-Hungarian Empire breathed its last, Viennese Modernism lost four of its main proponents,
Gustav Klimt,
Egon Schiele,
Koloman Moser
and
Otto Wagner.

Otto Wagner

Wien Museum Karlsplatz Through Oct. 7

Post-Otto Wagner: From the Postal Savings Bank to Post-Modernism

Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art Through Sept. 30

Of these luminaries, it was Wagner, a bold and uncompromising architect and urban planner, who left the most indelible mark on the fabric of this city. His greatest works, many of which line these streets, are marked by their creator’s inimitable gift for uniting elegance, sophistication and utility. In the Austrian Postal Savings Bank (Österreichische Postsparkasse), completed in 1912, a futuristic fusion of marble, aluminum and glass that is perhaps his most celebrated building, Wagner created a Gesamtkunstwerk for the modern age whose every detail (down to the furniture that Wagner designed) expressed the belief that a life spent in “interiors executed in the styles of past centuries” was an “artistic absurdity.”

“The only possible point of departure for our artistic creation is modern life,” Wagner insisted in 1895. Continually striving for a “harmonization of art and purpose,” he achieved a revolutionary synthesis of design, material and function that not only helped define the architecture of his age, but had a world-wide impact on urban planning.

On the centenary of his death, Vienna is honoring Wagner with two ambitious and insightful exhibits. Though independently curated, they demand to be seen in conversation with each other.

The first and more immediately satisfying is at Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna’s city museum. It takes us on a tour of the architect’s career and his major projects and commissions—including many that were never realized—with a combination of thoroughness and elegance that I’m sure Wagner would have approved of.

Wagner’s ‘View of the City Museum on Karlsplatz’ (1907)
Photo:
Otto Wagner/Wien Museum

The exhibit is a coup for the Wien Museum, an excellent and unfairly neglected venue in this museum-saturated city. This location can also boast a special connection to Wagner, who spent a decade drafting plans for a City Museum on Karlsplatz. His bold designs (thwarted by conservative officials) are presented in great detail in the show’s largest gallery. A handsome 500-plus-page exhibit publication also doubles as the first complete catalogue raisonné of Wagner’s realized and unrealized projects and designs.

Wagner rebelled against the historicism that had held sway over liberal Vienna and had inspired its most remarkable architectural achievement, the Ringstrasse Boulevard. In a speech given at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1894, he argued that “The realism of our time must penetrate the work of art.”
Carl E. Schorske,
in his groundbreaking “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture” (1980), called Wagner’s buildings and projects that responded to the changing social rhythms and psychological problems and necessities of modern life “functional futurism.”

In 1897, Wagner found common ground with the Vienna Secession and its anti-traditional aims. This can be seen in the sinuous and floral Art Nouveau details that crop up in many of Wagner’s projects from the turn of the century, including the largest commission of his career, the Vienna Metropolitan Railway, for which Wagner designed 42 viaducts, 78 bridges, 15 tunnels and 36 stations. While many of the gate buildings for the elevated subway lines saw the light of day, only two of his ornate pavilions for the underground lines—in white marble festooned with green iron and gold—at Karlsplatz were realized.

“Browsing through his life’s work, you might weep tears at rage at these magnificent ideas never realized and at the designs chosen above his,” wrote
Adolf Loos,
who, despite his famous aversion for the sort of modernist ornament that Wagner often employed, respected and admired the elder architect. Learning about the projects that never came to pass, it’s easy to share Loos’s bitterness. Then again, what Wagner did manage to achieve in Vienna is nothing short of breathtaking.

Wagner’s grandest accomplishment is arguably Am Steinhof, the psychiatric hospital in the western part of the city built between 1903 and 1907. Much of Wagner’s thought about the form and function of the modern metropolis comes together on the generously appointed sanatorium grounds, which contain 60 pavilions laid out in a grid. At its peak stands the Church of St. Leopold, an oratory with stunning stained glass by Moser and angels with golden wings beneath a gilded-iron cupola. At the opening, a journalist quipped, “Is it not a beautiful irony of fate that the first sensible Secessionist building in Vienna has been built for the insane?”

Back in the heart of Vienna, the Postal Savings Bank was the only chance that Wagner ever got to transform the historicist character of the Ringstrasse. It is a monument to the Machine Age. Aluminum is the defining material, from the nearly 17,000 caps that punctuate the marble and granite façade to the statuesque vents prominently displayed in the atrium-like cashier’s hall, a sleek and airy marvel of iron, glass and light.

Wagner’s aluminum vent, its function aestheticized, is a forerunner of the revolutionary exterior Renzo Piano designed for the Pompidou Center in Paris. This is one of the constructive connections made in the course of “Post-Otto Wagner: From the Postal Savings Bank to Post-Modernism,” a sprawling show at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art that examines the global impact of Wagner’s work. It makes clever, persuasive comparisons between designs by the Viennese master and architectural visionaries from
Le Corbusier
to Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown,
and discusses Wagner’s theoretical plans for the “unlimited city,” the elastic metropolis of the future, laid out in an unsentimental grid, that he considered the logical outcome of modernism and industrialization. Though Wagner was wrong to predict that Vienna would become such a city, his thinking about infinite urban expansion can easily be applied to megalopolises in modern-day Asia.

Beyond such connections and associations, the exhibit discusses Wagner’s lasting influence as a teacher. At the Academy of Fine Arts from 1894 onward, he taught a generation of the multiethnic empire’s most brilliant minds. Along with the celebrated
Josef Hoffmann,
his pupils included the pioneering Czech modernist
Josef Gočár
and the visionary Hungarian
István Medgyaszay,
who transmitted Wagner’s philosophy throughout Mitteleuropa.

A full immersion in the Wagner universe, both as presented in these shows and reflected in the city he ushered into the modern age, forcefully underscores Schorske’s assessment that Otto Wagner “hammered out ideas of urban life and form whose influence is still at work among us.”